services

Unlike most students i'm not new to Haiku, i've already contributed around the Haiku community, maybe you can remember me for my work on Caya (msn plugin). Not by chance my gsoc project is somehow related to Caya (and every app that expose contacts).

The fundamental idea is to provide a core set of classes with the aim of contacts integration into the system.
The basic idea around the entire project is fairly simple in theory : The api should be easily extendable.

Originally, my idea was to provide an API for Person/People files only. The developers, which have a more large vision of the whole system, have warned me about it in discussions, providing very useful suggestions. The resulting proposal is interesting, and i hope you will enjoy it.

Services Server
The services server at the end of my work will only host add-ons, in future it will provide the necessary infrastructure to keep in sync contacts between different services (including contacts merge).

Services Addons and Contacts translators
The Services Add-ons will be used to extend the system functionalities, a contacts "provider" addon will be located here. As demonstration for the api will be created a Google Contacts addon. However, and addon will have the possibility to work as "consumer", i.e. it will only pubblish contacts in a defined manner.

The "Contacts translators", are Haiku translators used to provide independent support for different contacts files, i will create two translators : vCard a